Much has happened this past week with Marsha P. Johnson Park in Williamsburg. At last week’s Community Board 1 Parks & Waterfront Committee, community members were up in arms over the lack of notice, transparency, and community input into a $14 million plan to cover the park with garish thermoplastic. They were joined by the Johnson family and LGBTQ activists, passionately demanding a halt to the proposed park redesign. According to Brooklyn Paper, Johnson’s cousin James Carey said at the meeting: “I personally feel this was a mass deception campaign and our family was deceived, moving forward, from this point forward, no one will be trying to exploit my cousin’s name without consulting with my family.”
As a result of the outcry, NYS Parks issued a temporary stop work order the very next day. NYS Parks Regional Director Leslie Wright also wrote an open letter, dated March 9th, apologizing for the lack of community outreach. She wrote that State Parks leadership has “heard the feedback and realized that the design outreach we did was simply not enough and for that we are deeply sorry. There were many voices in the neighborhood who did not believe they had a chance to be heard and it is our first and foremost priority to rectify that immediately.” Wright assured the community that State Parks will not install the thermoplastic mural or plastic flowers in the park and will seek community input going forward. “The interpretive design elements of this project will not be installed until we can develop a new path forward with the community. This means no mural will be placed on the historical concrete slabs in the park, and no floral interpretive elements will be installed in the gantry plaza area. We will work hand in hand with the community to identify a more appropriate commemorative design direction for this park. We will begin to organize public design workshops to be held at Marsha P. Johnson State Park beginning as soon as April.”
To the dismay of the community, however, Wright also wrote that State Parks intends to move ahead with the rest of the proposed redesign, including the removal of part or all of the historic industrial platforms. In response, Brooklyn Community Board 1 passed a resolution later that evening, calling for Parks to “cease construction on the redesign of the Marsha P Johnson State Park and construction must continue to be halted until NY State Parks representatives convene scoping meetings with the larger Greenpoint/Williamsburg community, the LGBTQ+ community and the family of Marsha P. Johnson on a new design of the park that reconsiders all areas, uses and elements of the park including, but not limited to the slabs areas, the thermoplastic mural and foam core flowers, historic preservation, pathway and roadway treatments, fiscal allocations, and the open food market concession.” The resolution also calls for NYS Parks to withdraw the outstanding Request for Proposals for the open food market concession “until NYS Parks receives full input from the public regarding the design of the entire park including the former platform sites.”
In the meantime, the Stop the Plastic Park petition continues to gather support and stands at 1,889 signatures as of this morning.
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Prior posts on the Marsha J. Johnson Park:
- THE P DOESN’T STAND FOR PLASTIC, March 3rd, 2021